


Unconditional

by verumbark



Series: D-End 2 Rescue AU [1]
Category: Zero Escape (Video Games), Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bittersweet Ending, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, apparently this made some of my friends cry actual tears, character death (only in other timelines tho), if you have any family-related triggers i dont recommend reading this, sigdi cant keep the kids sheltered forever, sorry yall but they gotta suffer, warning: includes Bad Shit thats kinda par for the course because its zero escape but, welcome to hell! welcome to hell! welcome to h
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-11
Updated: 2016-09-11
Packaged: 2018-08-14 08:14:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8005279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verumbark/pseuds/verumbark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a timeline where the D-End 2 family was actually rescued, the Klim twins have a lot to discover about the world... and about themselves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unconditional

**Author's Note:**

> honestly this just started as a fun midnight idea like "hey what if akane actually came back with help and the klims could get to be happy forever"
> 
> spoiler alert: i realized they couldnt
> 
> enjoy

The year was 2029, and the twins had only just come into the world. All they knew was that it was dark, and then they knew light. The sun made them cry, for they were not used to seeing such bright things, but the woman with the red sweater and the man with the blue shirt calmed them down. The woman would sing to them as they would lie in their cribs, to help them go to sleep, and she would play a song on the boy’s necklace. The man told them stories that they could not understand. They liked to hear their voices, and they liked to see their faces. The world was a peaceful and cozy place.

 

* * *

 

The year was 2030, and the twins had just had their very first birthdays. They knew more then than they did when they were newborns. The woman’s name was Diana, and the man’s name was Sigma, and they both loved the twins very much. They had learned how to turn the pages of a book, and they had learned how to call the man and the woman by the names they liked: “Mama” and “Dada”. They had learned that their names were Phi and Delta, but they didn’t yet know how to say those words as clearly as their parents did. They had learned that if someone turned the little handle on Delta’s necklace, their favorite bedtime song would come out. How the bird managed to sing it without moving its mouth was a puzzle to them both. The world was new and full of wonders.

 

* * *

 

The year was 2031, and the twins were two years old. Small words made sense to them now, and the symbols on the pages of books now told them simple stories. They could talk just like Sigma and Diana did so often, and they could say their own names when they were asked. Walking was a little harder, but they were trying their best, and Sigma told them they would get good at it eventually. They loved their parents very much, and they could tell them that, which they often did. Sometimes that made Diana cry. Phi would ask what was the matter, and Diana would say that she was crying because she was happy. That didn’t make much sense, but at least Diana was happy, and they liked it when she was happy. They were happy too. The world was their playground.

 

* * *

 

The year was 2032. The twins were three years old, and their favorite colors were blue and purple. They were writing stories now that Sigma had taught them how. They learned the name of the town they lived in and the address of their house, and they learned what friends were and how to make them. They were mischievous, as toddlers often are; they wrote their names and drew crude stick figures in permanent marker on their bedroom wall, they tried on Diana’s pink lipstick, and they very nearly dropped Sigma’s cell phone into a fortunately empty sink. They were just starting to learn the difference between right and wrong. They had begun to ask questions about where they came from and how they were born. Sometimes that made Diana cry. Phi would ask what was the matter, and Diana would say that it was nothing. That didn’t make much sense, but Phi was satisfied, trusting her mother to be okay. Delta didn’t seem so sure. They were nervous and excited and confused all at once, and most of the time they just felt vaguely happy. The world was overflowing with possibilities.

 

* * *

 

The year was 2033, and the twins were four years old when they began their first year of kindergarten; Sigma thought they were smart enough to start early, and the grown-ups in charge of the school agreed. They got along well enough with the other kids, even though they kept mostly to themselves. Every day, Phi would bring home a new colorful work of art, and Delta would bring home bugs, claiming that they were his friends. The questions they asked their parents went deeper and deeper. They wanted to know where the world came from, and why they existed in the first place. They wanted to know what would happen when they died, and if there was a way that they could avoid dying altogether. Diana had grown used to all of this, but she still seemed a little uneasy when they asked her what she and Sigma did before they became their parents. Phi didn’t ask what was wrong anymore, because she was confident that her parents would be happy in the end. Delta never said a word about it, either. He liked to pretend he didn’t notice. The two rarely fought, and they helped each other out in times of need, especially when they were scared about one thing or another. The world had a few bad things in it, they had found, and life just wasn’t fair all the time, but everything was going to turn out okay.

 

* * *

 

The year was 2034. The twins wanted to have a big birthday party when they turned five, but they didn’t have any close friends to invite, so the Klim family decided to party on their own. They had streamers and chocolate cake and cheesy animated movies that brought a smile to the grown-ups’ faces and had the kids on the edge of their seats the whole way through. That was the year Delta’s eyes changed color from blue on white to lavender on grey, and the year Phi asked her parents if maybe she could dye her hair. They told her she would have to wait until she was older. The twins had stopped asking questions so often because now they were determined to find the answers for themselves. They discovered that Minesweeper and Solitaire weren’t the only things you could do with a computer, and they learned that you could answer a lot of important questions just by typing them into a white bar. Not all of the answers made sense, though; they didn’t know what significance the number 42 held to the universe, and they didn’t really think it was plausible that some angry old man in the sky created everything they knew and needed their constant validation. Still, they learned so much new information that they didn’t even know how to handle it all. They felt like the smartest kids in the world. Sigma said that they had a lot of insight for their age, and Diana said they were a little too smart for their own good. They decided to take that as a compliment. The world was fascinating and newer than before, and they felt like they had just been born all over again.

 

* * *

 

The year was 2035, and by the twins’ sixth birthday, Delta’s eyes were bright purple on a backdrop of black. The doctor said his condition was harmless, but that didn’t stop everyone from being a little concerned for his health. On his request, they got him a pair of glasses with lenses dark enough to hide his eyes completely. He never left the house without them. Phi was persistent in asking her parents to let her dye her hair, and they gave her the same answer every time. She wanted to know why. They never told her. Every time she asked them why, they would just go silent again. Second grade was fun enough, but Phi didn’t like the busywork. Sometimes Delta would do the day’s homework for both of them, because he didn’t mind it half as much, but Sigma said that wasn’t a good way to learn integrity, and if he caught him doing it again, they’d both get in trouble. That only taught the twins how not to get caught. They were partners in crime; they stayed up well past their bedtime to come up with convoluted schemes, with Delta feeding his sister crazy ideas and Phi somehow figuring out how to make them a reality. When they went and sneaked around at night, they heard nervous whispering from their parents’ room, and they knew those two had to be hiding something, but what was it? It became their mission to find out.

 

* * *

 

The year was 2036, and the twins were seven years old. “Should we tell the kids?” was a question they’d heard asked from the other side of their parents' bedroom door, and the response was always “never”. They didn’t know what it meant. They didn’t know what information was being withheld from them. The whole deal with their parents’ dark secrets was becoming a bit less of an adventure and more of a source of anxiety. It was their turn to whisper nervously at night; they whispered about what-ifs and ways to relieve their parents’ worries, and it never even crossed their mind that letting it go was a choice they could make. The issue consumed a great deal of their capacity for concern. Phi had given up on asking about her hair, and Delta didn’t care so much anymore about hiding his eyes. They had both developed a reputation at school for being “freaks”. They didn’t mind. Snails and spiders and fluffy white clouds made better friends than people. During recess, they would lie on their backs and talk to them about the world. Until one day, all of a sudden, they didn’t. Delta had stopped talking to people altogether; in the week before the twins’ eighth birthday, he only left his room when he absolutely had to, and he never said a word to anyone, not even the teachers. Now Phi had to figure out his secret, too. She didn’t know what was going on. Some nights that made her cry, and this time, there was nobody around to ask her what was wrong.

 

* * *

 

The year was 2037, and the twins were eight years old. School no longer concerned them. Their grades and their overall moods had both taken a sharp turn for the worse. It took Phi months to get any kind of explanation from her brother about his behavior. He said he knew why Sigma and Diana didn’t want her to dye her hair. That was all she was told. She kept asking why and how. Every time, that made Delta cry. She would have asked what was wrong, but she didn’t know he was crying at all; nobody could see his tears through those amber lenses and that curtain of long auburn hair. Sigma called everyone to a family meeting because they needed to talk about everyone’s school situation and Delta’s antisocial behavior. No change was made in the end. The twins were lucky that they didn’t get held back. They learned to cheat on tests and convince their parents that all was well. They learned that children could be cruel, and that the word “freak” was far from a compliment. Phi slowly lost faith in her brother as he grew more and more detached from the outside world, and his reactions to her attempts at reaching out grew increasingly stronger. On his worst days, she would find herself involuntarily closing the door to their room every time she tried to open it. She didn’t understand why, and she couldn’t get close enough to ask him. She went to her parents for help. The same thing happened when they tried to confront him. Nobody knew what was going on with Delta, Phi was still hiding her academic problems from her own parents, and everyone was having a hard time getting to sleep at night. Phi went to sleep in Sigma and Diana’s room when it got unbearable. Diana didn’t have the necklace with her anymore, but she would hum the tune to the bluebird song in that beautiful voice of hers until her daughter was fast asleep. For only a few minutes, Phi could pretend the world was peaceful again, but every morning she was forced to realize that it wasn’t. She hated getting out of bed knowing that she was all alone.

 

* * *

 

The year was 2038, and now that the twins were nine years old, Sigma and Diana had decided that enough was enough. They knew their children were dealing with something on a deep emotional level, and they had promised themselves on the day they were rescued in Nevada that they would never allow Phi or Delta to suffer as they had suffered. They made an active effort to learn more about both of them, which only made Phi more anxious and Delta more willing to isolate himself. Their grades grew worse, the other kids grew more obnoxious, and they woke up everyday with less hope of escape. It wasn’t until Sigma called another family meeting that their bottled-up fears and secrets came rushing out all at once. Phi had been hiding what had she’d been doing at school, and she had sneaked around behind everyone’s backs for the sake of information they didn’t want her to have, and she had lied for what seemed like an eternity right to her parents’ faces, and she felt awful. She wondered aloud if Delta had been going through the same thing. The answer he gave made no sense to her, but once he was done talking, both Sigma and Diana were open-mouthed and paralyzed with shock. He knew what they had been hiding, Phi took away that much, but the details might as well have been spoken in an alien tongue. Why were her parents so scared? How did he know? She was going to ask, but Diana beat her to it, adding that neither her nor Sigma had said anything about their secret out loud before. He told them that he didn’t know how, that maybe he was just a really good guesser, but he knew. He said he felt like there was more to come. Phi didn’t understand — she’d learned that nobody understood — and she didn’t know whether that made matters better or worse. The clouds in the sky and the bugs under heavy stones were no longer of help for anyone. _It’s not fair_ , she wanted to scream aloud, and there was a little voice in the back of her head that always replied, _life isn’t fair, Phi_. Even her parents, upon whom she had always depended, were starting to act strange around her. She slept in her own bed at night again because she didn’t want to see the looks in their eyes and on their faces. She slept with Delta’s necklace next to her ear; he had long since stopped wearing it, so taking it from him was easy, and its melody was the only thing left that brought her comfort. On the bunk above hers, Delta had his eyes wide open all night. He didn’t get a wink of sleep, not even as the bluebird song played below him; in his mind, its soothing sound was drowned out by the screams of his parents. His vision was obscured by the sight of the people he cared so deeply about dying horrible, painful deaths. Phi’s namesake looked just like her, he thought. He wished he could have met all of them, everyone he saw in his parents’ memories, even if they would have died and left him in mourning. He wished he could have just jumped into the past and punched that bastard Zero – whoever he was – right in the face. Somehow, he felt like he knew them all. He owed them something. Maybe an apology or a helping hand. Maybe he was just a delusional little boy who needed help or medications or something. Whatever the truth was, though, Delta was absolutely submerged in misery.

 

* * *

 

The year was 2039.

On the twins’ tenth birthday, memories flooded into Sigma and Diana’s heads at a dizzying speed.

They remembered everything.

_Everything_.

Numbness came first, then grief, then all-out panic. They had promised. They promised they wouldn’t let the kids bear the burden of their trauma, and they had failed to keep that vow. What if they found out everything? Who they were? Why they were? How would they keep hiding this from Phi? From Delta?

That was just it. They couldn’t hide _anything_ from Delta. It was impossible. Thanks to his powers, the “mind hacking” that they’d all thought was just great intuition, he would find out soon enough. All they could do was hope he’d take it well.

That hope lasted them about five seconds. Two rooms away, Phi cried out her brother’s name as heavy, rapid footsteps sounded from the hall. The front door opened, then slammed shut, and before Sigma and Diana knew what was going on, they were chasing after their son. They tripped on nothing almost simultaneously as soon as they spotted him running down the sidewalk, and they could hear him scream at them to leave him alone. It wasn’t okay, he told them, and he didn’t care if they forgave him or not. He’d stop them every time they’d try to follow him.

They went inside, knowing from experience that he would live up to that claim, and Sigma filed a missing person report as Diana held her bewildered daughter as tightly as she could.

It rained for a long time. Phi knew that meant the clouds didn’t even want to talk to her. She felt like everyone else was in on something huge, and she was the only one left out. She just wanted everything to be okay again.

Delta turned up at the police station ten days later, unconscious and covered in cuts and bruises. There were dark circles under his eyes and there was vomit all over the indigo sweater Diana had knitted for him. According to the people in charge there, he was barely clinging to life, and he had to be taken to the emergency room as quickly as possible.

Phi still didn’t get it.

She wouldn’t get it for months. Sigma and Diana had already accidentally given one of their children a heavy dose of soul-crushing trauma, and they weren’t about to do that to the other one. They spent half their time visiting Delta in the hospital to make sure he was going to be okay, which only made him angry at first, but eventually he started to look forward to seeing them again. He didn’t want to feel alone either. Phi wanted to come so badly, but they didn’t want to risk her getting those memories back too. It was only when her brother finally returned that she found out why he had left. She still didn’t remember, but he was willing to tell her everything; he said he at least owed her the truth after everything he’d put everyone through. She told him that it didn’t matter that he ran away, because now he was back, and he smiled and told her she should sit down.

It was a bit too much to handle all at once. She didn’t believe him until Diana reluctantly confirmed that what he said was true. Feeling helpless, she cried for her family. Her eyes were their own little rainclouds. They rained for a long time.

Even so, from then on everyone slept a little easier at night. There were no more secrets to be kept, no more tears or feelings to hide. Things were far from totally fine, of course, but that constant feeling of dread had finally gone away. The clouds seemed gentler. The bugs seemed friendlier, although the twins never saw a snail the same way again. The other kids’ taunts and whispers didn’t seem so significant anymore. Most importantly, the family was finally on good terms with each other.

Once more, the twins’ world was peaceful… enough. And as the bluebird sung its song, they drifted off to sleep feeling like it was going to stay that way.


End file.
